The story of the United States was determined from the start by the manner of its birth. The original 13 English colonies may seem lost in the distant past. Yet it was their diversity that was the key to their union. The creation of the US reflected the tensions of 17th-century England, pitting the Puritan republicans of Massachusetts against the landed gentry of Virginia, Quaker New Jersey against Catholic Maryland. The Founding Fathers resolved these tensions by instituting the concept of states’ rights. Their Constitution was a tissue of compromise, yet it was robust. What served to unite 13 colonies still holds together the mightiest nation on Earth.

Over the course of the 19th century this union of “free states” attracted to America the most spectacular migration in world history, that of some 50 million Europeans. Imperial rivals such as Spain and France were swept aside. America’s native inhabitants were driven off their land. Yet when Jefferson, Madison and Adams sought to balance federal and states’ rights in the 1770s they did not take up arms against each other as have so many other revolutionaries. They entrenched liberties in their local governments, the states.

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They did more. Schooled in Locke and the ancient classics, they studied republican Rome to curb the power of the union’s center. America was to know no king or emperor. Decisions of an elected president were subject to congressional scrutiny and veto. Without Congress, a president could not declare war, except in “emergencies.” A third power, that of the Supreme Court, stood apart as the final arbiter of the constitution. This triumvirate has clearly proved vulnerable to partisan abuse – but it still applies, as the coming year will show.

The union’s first test was bound to be slavery, and it brought disaster. By the time of independence in 1776, slaves were critical to the South’s economy. Most of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. The Declaration of Independence had asserted the equality of mankind, but carefully ignored the rights of enslaved and Native Americans. This deliberate neglect prevented the union from fragmenting over its first 70 years, as did other American empires. But it could not last. In 1861, the Southern states seceded from the union and established an independent Confederacy. The resulting Civil War – couched as a battle over states’ rights – emancipated the........

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